meme – Page 3 – Peaceful Reader

Weekend Cooking; The Geranium Farm Cookbook

by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton & 10,000 Geranium Farmers

(2006) 136 pages

At our church Christmas Bazaar we have a beautiful book table with used books from our members. It is a wonderful way to share and recycle the books we have read all year. We are a well-read and well-fed congregation as recipe books take up an entire table.

This year a had this one in my stack and my intention was to give it to my mother as she is a true cookbook collector. I read through it one night though and fell in love with the uncomplicated recipes. I love to read through the vignettes interspersed throughout the book as well. I loved this quote from one

Baking Friday Afternoon

I could hardly believe my ears: Rosie requested that we bake a pie on Friday afternoon. Always say yes when your teenager wants to do something with you-anything this side of legality. It could be years before it happens again. (48) ~ Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

Words of wisdom there!

I’ve made these two recipes from this book so far-both excellent.

Curried Olive Spread

1 block of cream cheese, light or otherwise
1 cup pitted, chopped green salad olives (more or less to taste and you can use exotic olives if you prefer)
1 T. curry (more or less to taste)

Cube the cream cheese, then put cheese and olives in a food processor. Blend until mixture is slightly lumpy. Stir in curry. Can be served immediately, but sitting in the fridge for an hour or so allows the flavors to blend. Serve with crackers, celery sticks, or toasted bread squares.

My grandmother gave me this recipe when I entered the working world. She told me there would be many occasions where I would be expected to bring an appetizer to a dinner, and this one was quick, easy, and tasted delicious. After all, she mused, working women were busy and didn’t have all day to create fabulous food...(108) ~ The Rev. Laurie Brock, Mobile, Alabama

Can’t resist grandmother advice either! I served this dip with a loaf of my fresh homemade bread. The dip made enough for leftovers and I’ve been eating that as a snack with gluten-free crackers all week.

Corn Spoon Bread

1 cup (organic) milk
1 T. (unsalted) butter
1 cup cornmeal
1 can creamed corn
2 eggs, separated
1 T. (sea) salt
1 T (freshly ground) black pepper

Scald the milk in a saucepan. Melt the butter into the milk. Add the cornmeal and cook until thick. Stir in the creamed corn. Beat the egg yolks with the salt and pepper. Stir the yolks into the corn mixture. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. Fold the egg whites into the corn mixture. pour into a well-greased quart baking dish. Bake at 350* for 50 minutes to 1 hour or until a wooden skewer inserted int eh middle comes out clean. Serves 6-8
This is a favorite recipe of mine from my Indiana childhood. ~The Rev. Gerald W. Keucher, New York, NY (123)

I have a thing about creamed corn-a childhood food memory-so this appealed to me on that level. I made it for a church potluck and by the time I made it through the line it was gone, bowl scraped clean just as it should be at a potluck.

Link for Geranium Farm. This post is linked to Beth Fish Reads Weekend Cooking meme. Drop over and see what she is dishing about and many other food-related posts.

In other family news our new refrigerator has been ordered but is back-ordered. My hope is that it arrives somewhere in the vicinity of the first two weeks of Feb. Back order seems to happen with all appliance purchases now.
I’m reading Claire Marvel by John Burnham Schwartz – beautifully written, taking many post-it’s to mark my favorites.
I watched Burlesque last night and loved it-don’t know why it took me a year. Cher and Christina Aguilera were wonderful. I watched Eat, Pray, Love also yesterday and while it dragged in spots was uplifting to me. Made me savor my own loves. So decadent to watch two movies in one day-it was a “free” day in a way.

Weekend Cooking; Shaking things up with a new pizza recipe

(Our zucchini pizza straight out of the oven)

My husband has been very tied up this week both at work and directing a high school production of Little Women; The Musical. He was called in to save the play when the directer originally hired for the position up and quit. She deserted right after she’d picked the play and cast it! Then zip, gone! Our son is a student at the school and they’ve asked handsome husband to direct before but it’s never worked out. This time he said yes.

What does all that have to do with my cooking week? Our schedule has been off. He and my son, who he sweet talked into playing an old man, have been busy with rehearsals making this week an easy cooking week, filled with leftovers and warmed up pasta. I did make patty melts one night with some brat burgers I found at Hansen’s, my around-the-corner dairy/local food selling utopia. Last night we had a classic go-to comfort food dinner of refried bean burritos adding in roasted cubed eggplant to spice it up.

Earlier in the week I’d clicked on one of Janssen’s posts at Everyday Reading to see her menu line-up and found a recipe for zucchini pizza she shared from Perry’s Plate. I love making pizza and find it far superior to any pie purchased over the counter. Yes, I am a pizza snob, even shredding my own mozzarella. I have two round stones, a great pizza wheel and a recipe for dough from an old Rodale cookbook that I’ve used for years.

After reading the zucchini recipe I knew I had to try it. It is my new favorite! My husband and I ate all of it-I saved out one square to share with my amazing library volunteer. She and I love trading recipes and this will be good for her to try. My kids hated it though so it is not necessarily kid-friendly. Luckily the dough makes two pies and the second one I just tossed sauce and cheese on top and they ate it and smiled big pizza-smiles. What they did love though was smell of the kitchen during the pie-making and baking process! What a great tradition to pass on.

Enjoy!

Other baking news:

Perry’s Plate (at the Tasty Kitchen) has a gluten-free apple, ginger, and spice scones which uses almond flour. I’m going to make these soon just to experiment with gluten-free.

I signed up to bake whoopie pies for our church bazaar-something Christmas-y. Maybe a peppermint/chocolate combo.

Weekend Cooking is a weekly meme hosted by Beth Fish Reads. Click there for many more food-related posts.

Weekend Cooking;The yumminess that is Bread Pudding w/ Whiskey Sauce

Teenage Son wrapped in new quilt made by
amazingly talented mother-in-law!

This is one of my husband’s favorite desserts and so I whipped it up to celebrate our anniversary. I like bread pudding but the pull for me is the sauce! This recipe is from an old Vegetarian Times (Feb, 2009) and its been written in my favorite recipes book ever since.

(Image from VT)

Bread Pudding with Whiskey Sauce

3 large eggs

2 egg whites

1 cup skim milk

3/4 cup maple syrup

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp freshly ground nutmeg

5 cups cubed day old whole wheat bread, cut or torn into 1/2 in-cubes

1/2 cup raisins

1/2 cup dried cranberries

Whisk together first 7 ingredients. Fold in cubed bread, raisins and cranberries. Let stand 5 minutes for bread to absorb custard. Set oven to 350 degrees. Coat 9-in square baking pan with spray and spread bread mixture into pan. Bake 35-40 minutes until no egg mixture is bubbling up.

Whiskey Sauce:

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup water

1/4 cup whiskey

Add water and brown sugar to small saucepan. Bring to a boil on med-high and let boil for 2 minutes. Remove from heat and add whiskey. Boil 2 more minutes and then transfer to small pitcher. Let cool just a bit and serve warm over individual bowls of bread pudding. Add flavored whipped cream to top of bowl.

This is such an easy recipe for the delicious “ooohs” and “aahhhs” you will get when you serve it!

Weekend Cooking is a regular meme hosted by Beth Fish Reads-click to her link to find many more food-related posts and recipes.

Happy Cooking!!

Weekend Cooking; Mouth-watering Vegan Chocolate Pudding

My stepdaughter, Kaylee, has been here all week and anytime she is here I step up my cooking. This week I tried three new recipes; one from my Sept. Vegetarian Times and two from Alice Waters’ In the Green Kitchen. All were delicious but the most adored recipe was a Vegan Chocolate Pudding from VT. It was completely unfair to pit this mouth-watering chocolate recipe against two other very good choices so you can find their recipes at the end of this post. Several of us dreamed about the pudding that night after eating it and talked about it the next day.

(image courtesy of Seraphic Singles)

Velvet Smooth Dark Chocolate Pudding (Sept, 2011)

This warm stove-top pudding packs a punch of deep chocolate flavor. It’s the perfect recipe for a quick company dessert or a simple nighttime treat.

3/4 cup packed light or dark brown sugar
3 T cornstarch
2 1/4 cups unsweetened hazelnut or almond milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
8 oz vegan semisweet chocolate, chopped

Whisk together brown sugar and cornstarch in medium saucepan. Gradually stir in hazelnut milk, whisking constantly to combine. Bring mixture to a boil over medium-high heat, or until mixture thickens. Stir in vanilla, and remove from heat. Add chopped chocolate, and let stand for 1 minute. Stir until smooth.

Mine didn’t thicken as much as I thought it should. We called it chocolate soup but licked our bowls anyway. Now I have to try, try, try to make this again and see if I can perfect it! Oh, the tribulations!

Here is the Lentil Soup recipe.
Here is the Apple Galette recipe.

I’ve loved paging through In The Green Kitchen and am thinking I might have to buy it. Waters’ has it set up with an informative opening about what a green kitchen is and how to stock a green pantry with a great list. Each featured chef has their own section, with their green cooking tip; something like David Tanis’ Simmering Beans advice followed by his recipe for White Beans with Garlic and Herbs, which I plan to make this week.

Weekend Cooking is a weekend meme hosted by Beth Fish Reads. Any food related post can join in-click on her link and take a look at all the other foodie-posts!

Weekend Cooking with Slow Food

Come To The Table; The Slow Food Way of Living edited by Katrina Heron with a foreward by Alice Waters presented by Slow Food Nation easily caught my eye as I browsed the new nonfiction at the public library. This book, filled with 12 California farm stories and a section of delicious sounding recipes, is packed full of information-all that and sage bits of wisdom from Alice to open the book. Heaven.

I’ve enjoyed paging through this book, looking at the earthy photographs of farming people, animals, and the fruits/vegetables of their labor. In each section I’ve found pearls of wisdom that I’m taking to heart. Sometimes it seems when our heart is into something we feel we know all about it. Reading this book made me realize I have so much more to learn about “organic” and sustainable-living. In “How-to: Store it/Saving from Scratch” I read this bit ” It seems obvious, but people forget: You can save a lot of money if you buy food you can store and use over time. For example, beans. Dried beans are far cheaper than the canned ones.”(11)

Reading about the 12 farms was enriching and made me ready to sow some seeds of my own. I can’t have chickens where I live but we do garden and these stories inspired me to try some new plants, to reach farther in my gardening quest. I read about Jennifer Greene, a grain specialist, who decided to see how many people one woman could feed…she says about 100. She grows grains the old-fashioned way in northern California in an idyllic setting. Now I like King Arthur Flour myself but I can only imagine what it would be like to buy flour from a woman farmer just down the road. That would truly be cool. Each farm family has an story worth telling and many have taken over family farms and turned them back to what they were years, and years ago. Funny that a big handful of people knew that what was once tradition would now be new.

At the tail end of the book live many slow food recipes I plan to try over time but not this weekend as Groovy Girl are on our own and we had take- out Chinese last night that did not muster up to what we can make ourselves. I was just trying not to have to cook after a very long day. Hmmmph.

Here is a short list of recipes titles that I’m interested in making:

Paul’s Best Biscuit Recipe (Sweet Home Ranch)
Spearmint-Stuffed Artichokes (Full Belly Farm)
Jennifer’s Chickpea Puree (Windborne Farm)
Battered Fried Zucchini (J & P Organics)
Pastaless Vegetable Lasagna (Tierra Miguel Farm)
Bean and Barley Stew (Redwood Roots Farm)
Eggplant Curry Soup (Vang Family Farm)
Okay, that recipe looks just so easy to type I’m going to share just this one:

Eggplant Curry Stew
2 or 3 Chinese eggplants, thinly sliced
1 T yellow curry paste
1 can coconut milk
3/4 cup sliced bamboo shoots
3/4 pound chicken breast and thigh, cubed in 1/2 pieces
3 or 4 lemon tree leaves or 1 stalk lemongrass can be substituted
Salt to taste
Place all ingredients in a medium saucepan and add cold water to cover. Bring the mixture to a low boil, then simmer until chicken is cooked to your preference. Add salt to taste. This thick stew can be served over rice.
Makes 4 servings(130)
[unless i’ ve recently cooked one of the few organic/local chickens from my freezer i would substitute tofu for chicken]

I’ve never read a recipe for Suckling Pig (Clark Summit Farm) but there is one listed and for dessert, let’s all have California Cloverleaf Farms Organic Cheesecake (Burroughs Family Farm).

Thank you to the library for such a feast of cookbookery!!
This post is linked to Beth Fish Reads Weekend Cooking meme. Click to her to find a whole slew of other foodie folks blogging about what they’re cooking up.

Look for it at in IndieBound bookstore near you by clicking on the title/link:

Come To The Table; The Slow Food Way of Living

This book counts toward my Foodie’s Reading Challenge.

Beets, Beautiful Beets!

Beets are a favorite root vegetable here at this house. I know this is rare. I have other friends, even farmer’s market-type friends, who turn up their noses at the lovely beet. The beet is nice and simple. I roast them with their skins on, olive oil drizzled, just enough so they don’t stick to the Corning Ware dish. The outer skin just rubs right off except you are trying to get it off while they are steamy hot! Once I get them peeled I sprinkle with some sea salt and serve them piping hot. Sometimes a small dollop of sour cream adds to the eating experience. We’ve been eating them frequently as they were easy to find at our last remaining markets.

Beets and Jitterbug Perfume go hand-in-hand. I started rereading Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins this week for my fourth book in the 451 Challenge, which finishes up at the end of November-I’m in a bit of a book-reading crunch as I have to catch up by two books (The Everafter and A Curse Dark as Gold) for my long distance book club and have to read My Abandonment by Peter Rock for my other book club. I hope to get all four of these books done before Thanksgiving.

This book has been one of my favorites since I read it the first time in my early twenties. I’ve read most of Tom Robbins books and his other’s are good but this one takes the cake or well, the beet! It is a love story that transcends the normal confines of time and place. It entertwines several lives, including a few mythical characters, from New Orleans, Seattle and Paris and they all come together over perfume, immortality and beets. Yes, beets.

From the beginning:

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

and another three paragraphs about the wonderul characteristics of beets!
The beet is unusual for sure and Robbins’ choice of this blood red veggie adds much charm as the beet is a character in this novel as much as any other.

Are you a lover of the lusty beet?
Have you read any Tom Robbins?

This post is connected to Weekend Cooking hosted by Beth Fish Reads.
Here’s a great post about the nutritional value of beets at The Lunch Box Bunch.

Teaser Tuesday-

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by Should be Reading-head there for more details.

Otherwise just…

Grab your current read.
Pick a random passage (not a spoiler) and post it.
Share the author and title so it can be added to reading lists.

Here’s my teaser(s):

That afternoon involved four sandwishes, soda, chips, buttered toast, chocolate milk. I ate my way through the refrigerator. Mom was still away at her new job, at the woodworking studio near Micheltorena, off Sunset into the hills, and my brother and George poured sugar and jam over toast and talked about their favorite TV series with the robots while I bit and chewed and reported to George. (36) The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender.

I am really enjoying this book and like Bender’s writing style. I’m interested in her other books-are they good also??

20 Questions-I answered them all…

(My kids playing by Lake Michigan)

Rebecca at Lost in Books hosts 20 Questions and I was featured waaay back on June 24th-right in the middle of my Michigan camping vacation. Read my answers to her interesting questions by clicking here. Her questions really made me contemplative about how everyone comes to reading from different places but how similar we all become with our faces tucked behind a book.

Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:
Grab your current read.
Let the book fall open to a random page.
Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

My teaser for the day is from Found by Margaret Peterson Haddix:

“And he’s my brother and I’m part of this family too, and doesn’t everything that affects him affect me, too? Katherine had said, sweeping her arms out in dramatic gestures, seeming to indicate a family so broad it could be the whole world.